For two decades a large industrial load could assume power. That assumption ended when AI compute began contracting for gigawatts on a schedule the transmission system was never planned around, and the interconnection queue turned from a formality into the single longest item on a build plan.
The consequence is that a megawatt is now a location and a date, not a quantity. Headroom at one substation is worthless to a campus twenty miles away on a congested corridor, and curtailment means nameplate generation and delivered energy are two different numbers that public reporting often blends.